Aircraft fuselages nowadays are generally manufactured in an aluminium shell construction. For the arrangement of windows, window openings are milled into the shells, which are assembled in a later manufacturing step to form a section of the aircraft fuselage. The shells can be either of single-walled or double-walled or multi-walled design with inner and outer shells being used, and with sandwich core material arranged between the inner and outer shells. The arrangement of the window openings in the shells is generally selected in such a manner that, in the finished aircraft fuselage, they are located approximately at eye level of people sitting in the passenger compartment. When looking at an aircraft fuselage from the outside, the window openings are arranged along one or more window bands running laterally along the aircraft fuselage.
After the window openings have been milled, they are each reinforced by an aluminium window frame. The window panes are subsequently placed into the aluminium window frames.
The fact that the windows constitute a mechanical weakening of the aircraft fuselage structure has proven a drawback to the above method for the arrangement of windows in an aircraft fuselage. This weakening is compensated for, as is known, by solid aluminium window frames. These disadvantageously result in an increased structural weight, high production costs due to the arrangement of the aluminium window frames in a separate working step, which is particularly labour-intensive because of rivets, and in further disadvantages, such as, for example, that only relatively small windows can be made.